In Paul Schrader’s updated edition of his seminal film theory and criticism book, Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer, the writer-director of First Reformed (not the senile Facebook shitposter) makes an illuminating connection and crucial distinction between what he defines as transcendental cinema and what’s recognized as slow cinema. The long take — still, static, sterile — is the Bible for both cinematic styles. The difference lies in their respective interpretations of it. Take, for instance, the “pillow shots” in Yasujirō Ozu’s films: these three-to-four-second-long shots of “life as it is” are digressive by design; the cuts to them from the character drama are unmotivated by filmic action. Schrader believes lingering on these “unnecessary” shots, even for mere seconds, generates an “emotional or intellectual or spiritual effect” that slow cinema, with its insistence on extending this “dead time” to three or four minutes, does not. It almost asks too much from the audience — it wants them to engage with the duration of the image to create an emotional, intellectual, or spiritual effect. When it’s an Apichatpong Weerasethakul film, you’re up for the challenge because the images themselves are mysterious. (The still and sturdy camera is oddly more receptive to sights and sounds of, if nothing else, the spiritual realm.) But when the images and subsequent drama become still and sterile, you begin to wish the film’s existence would remain a mystery. Sadly, Min Bahadur Bham’s Shambhala, the first Nepalese film to premier at major international festivals like Berlinale and Locarno this year, is that type of film. It wants to achieve transcendence through its slow cinema aesthetics, but it’s too conventionally narrativized to do so.
The first 45 minutes suggest otherwise. Here, its contemplative style — this is a film composed entirely of static long takes that either languorously pan-and-scan the simultaneously stark and splendid Himalayan vistas or, in lucky moments, gradually push into its actors’ subtly expressive faces to provide a glimpse of what they’re feeling — complements its largely plotless content. This makes its extended setup feel more like an overly patient but perceptive anthropological documentary about a Nepalese woman, Pema (Thinley Lhamo), engaged in a polyandrous marriage with three brothers, in which she plays a loving wife to the first brother, Tashi (Tenzin Dalha), a spiritual guide to the second one, Karma (Sonam Topden), and a mother to the third one, Dawa (Karma Wangyal Gurung). But Bham and co-writer Abinash Bikram Shah de-dramatize the potentially explosive family drama: Pema is not overtly portrayed as a victim of a traditionally patriarchal system; she’s, like every woman in the village, content on playing her role as homemaker to all three men. So, the camera spends considerable time simply observing her cooking meals for everyone, singing with Karma, encouraging Dawa to do his schoolwork, and helping Tashi with his trade. This “time spent” — preparing, accommodating, loving — is, essentially, “dead time.” But the film’s patient, slow style is essential here, for it honors the time spent by Pema to accomplish these tasks by showing them in their entirety.
Had Shambhala gone beyond mere observation to piece-by-piece pick apart the hypocrisies underpinning the traditional mindset of the Nepalese village people who allow a woman to have three husbands but ostracize her for having multiple lovers, the filmmaking style would hold some value. The problem is that it merely gestures toward it in several scenes that set up the film’s central conflict. The amiable relationship between a teacher, Ram (Karma Shakya), and Pema sparks rumors around the village that the two of them are having an affair. This news spreads like a raging wildfire, reaching Tashi, who, after hearing it, vanishes without a trace on his way back to the village from the trading route to Lhasa. But Bham shoots this potentially overdramatic sequence like he shoots Pema doing her work: calmly. His long takes encourage us not only to be with the character, but also to look closer at the other side of the Himalayan setting’s serenity: its deafening silence. They’re two sides of the same coin, and the inability to separate the silence that liberates from the silence that imprisons is the contemplative heart of the film.
Rather than allowing us to come to this conclusion naturally, though, Shambhala becomes, for the remaining 100 minutes of its exhaustingly long 150-minute runtime, a frustratingly tiresome and predictable experience, replete with all sorts of clichéd life lessons about self-liberation you can find in readily digestible “exotic” trash like Eat, Pray, Love. Why does this need to be shot like a slow film though? What’s the value of lingering on a wide shot of our characters stranded in the middle of the Himalayan Mountain range when the characters themselves will clarify their meaning? Shouldn’t we get conventional shot-reverse-shot editing to better emphasize how Pema and Karma increasingly get close to each other through their various hijinks on their trek to find their brother? This, and another million questions about film form, intrude into one’s mind during the film’s second half, as viewers are asked to try their best to prevent its “dead time” from becoming wasted time.
Published as part of Locarno Film Festival 2024 — Dispatch 4.
